Shay Mace
Lindsey Barlag Thornton is the creator and performer of flights for future generations, described as a ‘mystical aviation séance’, this multimedia and multidisciplinary piece aims to weave toether the histories of women aviators and spiritualists in America through movement, text, sound and analogue devices. Drawing from aviation pioneers like Bessie Coleman and Sally Ride alongside mystics like Hilma of Klint, Thornton layers these mythic figures alongside her personal family history. Thornton’s great-grandmother was one of America’s earliest female glider pilots; and her great-aunt, who spoke to the dead. We caught up with Lindsey for a pixelated pint to find out more about creating this intriguing and unique performance.
You can catch flights for future generations at Playground 1 at ZOO Playground on August 7th – 30th (not Mondays) from 10:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Shay: Hi Lindsey, tell us about your own relationship to the subjects of your seance lecture. Why have you have decided to bring this to the stage now?
Lindsey: It starts with a suitcase. When my great-aunt Lily died in 1997, my mom inherited a suitcase that had been hidden in Lily’s bedroom. On the outside, in black permanent marker, someone had written “SANDY”, my mom’s name. I’ve always loved that detail. The suitcase turned out to contain the materials of Lily’s secret spiritual practice and traces of her sister Alma, my great-grandmother, who we discovered was one of America’s earliest female glider pilots. Two sisters. One flew planes. One communed with the spirits. For years both these women haunted me with their search for ascension.
The suitcase lived in my Chicago apartment for about a decade, often tucked in a spare bedroom closet, and I would take it out occasionally and tell people: I need to make a work about this. What shifted in 2024 was that I stopped saying that and started actually doing it. I think part of what made it finally possible was that I had accumulated company for Lily and Alma: women across centuries who were in different ways reaching for something beyond the world they knew, who took to the sky in search of transcendence. Women with faith in something beyond themselves, but most vitally, faith in themselves. That felt vital to me, and prompted an urgency to make. All of this also coincided with a practical need, and a desire, to make solo work I could tour.
After ten years of ensemble practice, living between New York and Chicago, a solo show was most realistic for me. I’ve long been inspired by the bold, genre-defying work that comes out of Edinburgh Fringe. Its spirit of experimentation, risk-taking, and relentless creative hustle resonates deeply with my own practice. I’m bringing flights for future generations to Edinburgh now because I believe the Fringe is the next step in this project’s life.
Shay: How has the creative process been of putting the show together? Give us an idea of the journey you’ve been on with it so far.
Lindsey: The creative process has been circular in a way that’s felt genuinely new to me. Usually my devising follows a relatively linear process with conversations and journaling early on, then getting on our feet improvising, then editing and shaping the material. With this piece the writing and the movement and the sound design were all feeding each other in real time. A huge part of that was committing early on to the cassette tape as the score: the entire performance is scored by a tape, and you only hear my live voice once, at the very end. I’d discover something in the editing of sound and it would open up a new physical idea, and vice versa. And so this process became a delicate dance between simultaneously creating and editing in the rehearsal room.
I spent two years in the company of early women aviators, women mystics, the founders of theosophy; reading biographies, watching documentaries, going granular into Lily’s own papers, her letters and lists and newspaper clippings. But I knew from the beginning I wasn’t making a biography of a chronicle. These women weren’t stories I was going to perform. Rather, they were ingredients, jumping off points for images and actions. What drew me in was less the known facts and more the unanswered questions. The things we can’t know. What gets lost in transmission. I released myself from being completely faithful to written history , or even to my own memory. I started mixing and rewriting tet drawn from various women, letting their voices blur and layer. I also begin thinking about the unveiling of information in the performance in the way a memory reveals itself: fragmented and out of time.
The performance is haunted.
Projectors breaking. Lights not behaving. Tapes speeding up on their own. Recently I was filming a run through in a rehearsal space and on the video there’s a light blinking in the room that wasn’t blinking when I was in it. I’ve come to find the haunting instructive rather than alarming. Every technical strangeness has reshaped something, forced a new solution, and reminded me that I’m not entirely in control of this material.
There was also a loneliness to the making. For the last decade most of my work has been devised and directed with ensembles. Returning to my solo practice I was genuinely lonely at moments; I missed community and people to think out loud alongside with. But I’ve come to see that loneliness as part of the work’s meaning too. Bringing in Lauren Sharpe as a collaborator in 2025 was a real turning point. Her background in Neofuturism, clown, and dance helped me expand and sharpen the performance. There’s physics to making with another brain, a kind of magic that begins to happen. Lauren brought it back into my process and this performance.
Shay: What will be the first thing the audience sees, feels, and hears as they enter the space?
Lindsey: I’d like the audience to feel like they’ve arrived somewhere that has been prepared and is awaiting their very presence to begin. Zoo Playground’s space brings the audience close to me, and I am really excited to play with this intimacy as something slightly electric. The audience will enter a room set for a lecture: analogue equipment, objects with age to them, lighting kept low, only the room’s own sound present. I’ll be standing on stage wearing a yellow choir robe and a lampshade on my head, holding an old suitcase. There’s a silent greeting, a small ritual of welcome.
I open the suitcase and reveal a cassette tape player. The audience hears a hiss, static, a voice transmitting “Do you receive?”. There’s an uncanniness to the moment, an anticipation. I’ve been thinking a lot about how inherited memory has a texture like the degradation of a cassette tape: something that’s been copied and re-copied, where some things survive and some things don’t. I want that quality present in the room from the first moment through the last.
Shay: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?
Lindsey: A friend of mine saw an early dress rehearsal and described the show as feeling like “a collection of women who yearned for more…a room of one’s own, multiplied.” I’ve returned to that image many times since.
I hope audiences leave thinking about these women, and with the feeling these women are insisting on something still today.
I hope audiences conjure their own histories and memories as they watch.
I hope there are moments in the performance that delight them, that make them laugh.
I hope there are images and words that pierce.
I hope audiences feel the specific texture of unanswered questions.
I want it to feel like the best parts of going to church.
Shay: What journey has the show been on to find itself at EdFringe 2026?
Lindsey: The seeds go back to the pandemic, between 2020 and 2023 I was making images and text and voice recordings around this idea of a ghostly space woman, not yet connected to the suitcase, just following a feeling about longing and seeking the unknown. In 2023 I was teaching a course at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) called Ghost Practices and the research I was doing for that class, thinking about performance as a kind of ghost, started to propel me back to the suitcase. That Christmas, my husband, Mike gave me Amelia Earhart’s biography, and a book called They Flew about early levitation in the Christian church.
Things started to connect. I applied to festivals in late 2024, and was invited in February 2025 to share a 20 minute iteration with the Mix Performance Festival at Abrons Art Center in New York City. I was then invited to share the full sixty minute performance with Steppenwolf Theatre for their LookOut Series in March 2026; and played to sold out audiences.. Edinburgh feels like the natural next chapter. I want to bring this work to new audiences, both international and intergenerational. And I am beyond excited to do so at Zoo Venues.
Shay: With EdFringe now just around the corner, what are you most excited for?
Lindsey: The 10:15am slot, genuinely. I know that sounds like I’m being diplomatic about the time, but I mean it. Audiences who show up that early have made a specific, deliberate choice. They’re not worn down yet. There’s something about performing for people who came to the Fringe at that hour, on purpose, that I find really exciting. Also that’s amazing that I will have the whole day after my performance to see other shows. Beyond just presenting my work, I’m really looking forward to being in dialogue with a whole community of artists who are pushing boundaries and making innovative live art.
Shay: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
Lindsey: It’s a cup of tea brewed from an old tin found in the back of a loved one’s cabinet; mixed herbs, slightly floral, slightly smoky. There’s definitely a splash of something stronger, a warmness not quite enough to intoxicate but to make the edges of the room go a little softer and time a little less fixed. As you drink it, you’re not sure if twenty minutes or twenty years has passed. You have a sense you’ve been somewhere else and returned slightly changed.
A reminder, you can catch flights for future generations at Playground 1 at ZOO Playground on August 7th – 30th (not Mondays) from 10:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Image Credit: Claire Demos
